She shrugged. ‘Might as well.’
Definitely not seeming heartbroken.
‘Don’t want to take time off?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Sure?’
She gave him a hard stare. ‘My decision. Let’s just get on with it.’
‘Fine. They explained to you what happened?’
‘I got the basics from your colleague earlier. But you were there? You’ve actually seen him, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded.
‘So why don’t you tell me what happened?’
Carlyle replied, ‘That’s what I need to find out.’ He quickly ran through his visit to Cockpit Yard, not feeling any particular need to sanitize the story for the clearly robust Ms Millington’s benefit.
‘My God!’ Millington took another mouthful of tea. ‘Presumably it was some random nutter?’
The inspector looked at her carefully. ‘Why would you say that?’
‘You should know about these things rather better than me, Inspector,’ she said somewhat reproachfully. ‘Duncan must just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
Carlyle thought back to the CCTV images.
She had given up on the eye-contact now, allowing herself to be distracted by the guys playing billiards on the other side of the room. ‘I can’t see what else could have happened. What do you think?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Carlyle rummaged round in his jacket pocket and found a scrap of paper and a biro. This was supposed to be an interview, so he should at least pretend to take some notes.
Millington tapped an expensively manicured finger on the screen of her BlackBerry, which sat on the table. ‘You must think I’m a really hard bitch,’ she said, as if challenging him to deny it.
Just a bit. ‘No,’ he lied. ‘People react to this kind of situation in different ways. Not everyone automatically throws themselves to the ground and starts wailing. There are plenty of times when you just see people kind of closing down in front of you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Or they try to keep going as if nothing has happened — in some sort of denial. It’s all about individual coping mechanisms. There’s nothing wrong with being. . detached.’
For the first time, something approximating sadness crossed her face. ‘It doesn’t exactly feel real yet.’
‘These things can take time to sink in.’
‘The funny thing is, when he abandoned me in the theatre, I made a decision there and then to dump him. It had been such an effort to get him to come along at all, and then he buggered off before we even got to the interval.’ She gave the inspector a shamefaced smile. ‘Makes me a terrible person, eh?’
‘Not really.’ Carlyle adopted a sympathetic expression. ‘Happens all the time.’
She gave him a puzzled look.
‘Girls dumping their boyfriends, that is. Not the boyfriends getting stabbed and thrown in the back of a rubbish truck.’
She sighed. ‘We were together for eighteen months. The relationship was just getting into a rut. Neither of us was prepared to compromise enough to move things on. I felt that if I didn’t pull the plug now, things were only going to get worse. I didn’t want my whole life to start ebbing away.’
‘Right.’
Millington was staring off into space. ‘Anyway,’ she said quietly, ‘I’ve been seeing someone else for a while.’
Carlyle tried to scribble on the scrap of paper but found that the biro was out of ink. He tossed it on to the table in disgust.
‘He’s a lawyer, like me.’ She noticed the sudden look in the inspector’s eye. ‘He’s been in Brussels all this week,’ she added hastily.
Handy, Carlyle thought, but hardly a perfect alibi seeing as it’s only a couple of hours away on the Eurostar. ‘I’ll need his details all the same.’
‘Fine.’ She picked up her BlackBerry, and Carlyle recited his own email address. A couple of taps on the smartphone and it was done. ‘I’ve sent you his v-card.’
‘Thanks.’ He made a mental note to get Joe to check the guy out.
‘These things happen,’ she said — then seeing the scepticism in his face, she held up a hand. ‘Duncan was a nice guy.’
Nice?
‘But he was very narrow in his focus.’
Unlike you, Ms VP Legal.
‘He liked to describe himself as a good, old-fashioned hack.’
‘What did he mean by that?’
‘Basically, as far as I could tell, it meant he would spend as much time as possible in pubs, talking to his “sources”.’ Millington let out a hollow laugh. ‘He thought he was fighting against the idea that journalists should be chained to their desks twenty-four seven, simply rehashing stories from the internet.’
Carlyle glanced around. Now lunchtime was approaching, a steady stream of people began coming into the canteen to check out the chestnut mushroom, chard and pearl-barley stew and the smoked haddock. Feeling more than peckish, he wondered if his host would do the right thing and feed him. ‘So. . what kind of stuff did Duncan write about?’
Millington exhaled. ‘A wide range of stuff really.’ She reeled off a number of topics that covered a depressingly banal list of celebrities, reality-TV shows and politicians.
Doesn’t seem such a wide range of things to me, Carlyle thought sourly, just the same old shit. As far as he could see, newspapers in general were now totally redundant, and Sunday newspapers were the most redundant of the lot. He would quite happily never buy another newspaper again. Helen, however, for reasons best known to herself, bought the Sunday Mirror, which seemed to be pitched at people with a mental age of eight. Every weekend he picked it up and then vowed never to read it again.
‘It didn’t much matter what it might be,’ Millington continued, ‘Duncan always said that as long as you got something you could stick an exclusive tag on, you were sorted.’
‘So he’d sell his granny for a story, eh?’
She stared at him blankly. ‘He didn’t have a granny. Both of them are long dead.’
Lawyers, so fucking literal! ‘What about his work colleagues?’
‘I didn’t meet very many of them.’ She made a show of considering it for a moment. ‘Maybe only one or two.’
‘I’ll need their names.’
‘Okay. But Duncan didn’t really spend much time hanging out with anyone from his work. I think he got on okay with the people there but it was a very competitive place. They didn’t do team spirit at the Sunday Witness.’
‘Mm.’ Something else for Joe to follow up. The boy was going to be busy. Maybe he could get WPC Hall to help him. Anita would like that.
Right on cue, his phone started ringing.
‘Joe.’
‘How’s it going?’
Carlyle looked at Millington. ‘I’m speaking to the girlfriend now.’
‘Ex-girlfriend,’ she mumbled.
‘Just quickly then,’ said Joe, as he stifled a yawn. ‘First, it looks like we’re gonna get nothing from the CCTV.’
‘Great.’
‘There’s no way we can get even a partial shot of the killer’s face.’
‘Was that luck? Or did he know what he was doing?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I suppose not,’ Carlyle said. ‘What’s the second thing?’
‘Simpson wants to see you.’
‘Oh good.’ The inspector raised his eyes to the sky. ‘The day just keeps getting better and better.’
‘She would like you to get over to Paddington asap.’
‘Okay, okay.’ He gazed out of the window at the palace. It had started to rain. ‘I’m in Victoria anyway. I’ll finish up here, nip over and see her and then meet you back at the station in. . let’s say a couple of hours.’
‘Fine.’
Ending the call, Carlyle tossed his phone on to the table.
‘Problem?’ Millington asked.
‘Just the usual. Tell me more about last night.’
‘It was very low key,’ she said. ‘I’d booked the tickets weeks ago. Duncan clearly wanted to watch the football instead, but he at least managed to turn up, which wasn’t always the case. When his phone went off, he mumbled something about a story and disappeared.’